Carey Mulligan, Far From the Madding Crowd 2015 |
When Bathsheba goes to the corn exchange to sell her corn,
the farmers are surprised by her. But one rich neighbor, Mr. Boldwood, ignores
her. This piques Bathsheba’s interest. With one of her maids, she playfully
sends him a valentine, which she soon regrets. Bathsheba is “a woman with some
good sense in reasoning on subjects wherein her heart was not involved,” says
Hardy. She values Gabriel Oak’s opinion most, and when she asks him what he thinks
of this prank, he tells her honestly. She dismisses him, but when her sheep get
into the clover and are about to die of bloat, she is told Gabriel is the only
one who can save them. She begs him to come back and he does.
Gabriel no longer expects to marry Bathsheba. Hardy says,
“Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special
regard to his own standpoint in the midst.” When he supervises the shearing,
Bathsheba watches. “That his bright lady and himself formed one group, exclusively
their own, and containing no others in the world, was enough” for him. He
allows himself to be displaced by Boldwood at the shearing supper. Both he and
Boldwood are horrified however, when Bathsheba succumbs to the flattery of a
young soldier, Frank Troy. Boldwood threatens Troy and Bathsheba goes to the
town where his regiment is to break off with him, ending up marrying him
instead.
Both Boldwood and Gabriel Oak are aware that Troy meant to
marry a young woman named Fanny Robin, who was a maid on Bathsheba’s farm. As
the husband of Bathsheba, Troy squanders her money on racing and gets the
farmhands drunk at a harvest supper. It is a stormy night and Gabriel Oak is
left to try to cover the ricks full of grain. Bathsheba comes out to help him. “Thank
you for your devotion a thousand times, Gabriel! Good night – I know you are
doing your very best for me.”
When Fanny Robin dies, her coffin is brought to Bathsheba’s
farm. Wondering about the stories she has heard, Bathsheba opens it and sees
inside the baby that died with her. Troy comes home and finds her, telling
Bathsheba that this dead woman is more to him than she will ever be. Troy
spends his last money on a large tombstone for Fanny and jumps into the sea.
His clothes are found on the shore and everyone assumes he has drowned.
A year later, Boldwood hopes that Bathsheba will again look
in his direction and begs her to promise that she will marry him in six years,
when Troy is declared dead. But Troy is not dead. He returns the night that Boldwood
gives a Christmas party, hoping for Bathsheba’s positive answer. Troy grabs for
Bathsheba’s hand, she screams and Boldwood shoots him. Bathsheba buries Troy
next to Fanny Robin. Boldwood goes straight to the police, but he is not to be
hanged as his neighbors point out his insanity. He will serve a prison sentence
“at the Queen’s pleasure.”
At last free of any constraint, Bathsheba notices that
Gabriel Oak, who now possesses part of Boldwood’s farm, shuns her. In fact, he
tells her he is planning to leave for California. When she asks why, he says it
is to protect her good name, as people are beginning to talk about them. In the
end they agree together. “Theirs was that substantial affection which arises
(if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by
knowing the rougher sides of each other’s character, and not the best till
further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic
reality.” They marry in the “most private, secret, plainest” wedding.
I love Thomas Hardy. No other writer describes country life
so masterfully. In spring he says, “the vegetable world begins to move and
swell and the saps to rise, till in the completest silence of lone gardens and
trackless plantations, where everything seems helpless and still after the bond
and slavery of frost, there are bustlings, strainings, united thrusts, and
pulls-all-together, in comparison with which the powerful tugs of cranes and
pulleys in a noisy city are but pigmy efforts.” Amen to that! He also provides
a thick panorama of country life and a Greek chorus of people to comment on the
action.
Most Hardy heroines end up victims of fate or their own
passions, or of cruel society. Bathsheba Everdene is a vain beauty, skittish,
practical, and impulsive. She makes mistakes, but redeems herself by her
steadfast trust in and friendship for Gabriel Oak, who loves her beyond all
contrariness. In this story, Margaret Drabble says, Hardy found a way of
displaying “the sense of tragic and cosmic grandeur that was to distinguish his
mature work.” To my mind Bathsheba is delightfully embodied by Carey Mulligan
in the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s 2015 screen adaptation.
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